An audacious adaptation of a very theatrical play by Michel Marc Bouchard, Lilies succeeds--and let this be a lesson to us all--not because Bouchard and director John Greyson "opened it up," but because they found strong cinematic equivalents to the play's stagebound devices. The conceit is ludicrous--prison inmates act out events from the lives of one of the prisoners before a Catholic priest, who's been taken hostage and forced to watch--but never less than fascinating, as present-tense scenes in the prison alternate with both a theatrical presentation within its walls and unconventional flashbacks in which all of the female characters continue to be played by the male prisoners, without an ounce of camp. While the story itself becomes excessively melodramatic, the technique used to tell it is so riveting that it hardly seems to matter. An experiment that paid off. Recommended. (M. D'Angelo)
Lilies
(Wolfe, 96 min., R) Vol. 14, Issue 3
Lilies
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